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A House Tour: Yes, That House

The Red Room at the White House.Credit
Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

WASHINGTON

THERE are a couple of ways to get into the White House. The first is to win a presidential election. Difficult. Then there’s the easy way: You simply sign up for the White House tour, a free self-guided ramble through the eight rooms available for public inspection.

Actually, it’s not so easy anymore. In a simpler time, tourists just lined up at the White House and walked in. As demand increased, a booth was set up, in 1976, to dispense tickets on a first-come-first-served basis.

After the 9/11 attacks, the system changed radically. Now, anyone who wants to tour the White House must apply through the office of his or her representative in Congress, which forwards the names to the White House for clearance. And because the tour is a hot ticket, applications must be submitted at least 21 days ahead, and up to six months in advance. Successful applicants receive an e-mail with the date and time of their tour.

Once they get the green light, visitors show up at the appointed time on 15th Street between E and F Streets and join the line to enter through the southeast gate.

Anyone who has flown on an airline in recent years will recognize the familiar territory of identity checks and electronic scans, although here you do get to keep your shoes on. At the head of the line, rangers from the National Park Service check photo IDs against a list of names. Farther along, a Secret Service officer repeats the process. In the meantime, a park ranger hands out historical pamphlets to children. Someone, somewhere, judged the audience (eighth graders and younger) acutely.

“Dad, listen to this,” a boy behind me said after studying the document. “Benjamin Harrison was the first president to install electricity, but he was so afraid of it that he had the electricians turn the lights on and off.”

A barrage of presidential trivia followed. Dad looked stoic. He should have encouraged his son to do some missionary work with a cluster of adults behind us who were heatedly debating one of history’s great unanswered questions: did Grant lead the Union or the Confederate army?

Once they have passed through a scanner in a flimsy-looking prefab building, visitors proceed at their own pace. There are no tour guides. Instead, Secret Service officers stand ready to answer historical questions. More on them anon.

The ground floor, where the tour begins, deflates expectations. The hallway is dim. The rooms are small and little-used. A velvet rope bars entry. This is frustrating.

I would have liked to inspect the books in the library, but I couldn’t make out the titles. The China Room, organized by Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Edith, to showcase plates and glassware used by the presidents, also tantalized. There they were, the presidential dishes, but well beyond visual range. Ditto the objects in the enticingly bright, golden-hued Vermeil Room, devoted to gilded silver accumulated over the years.

But in the hallway, visitors can step right up to a full-length portrait of Hillary Rodham Clinton, dressed in a black pantsuit and smiling radiantly.

I suspect that foreign visitors, especially if they think of the White House as the American equivalent of the Élysée Palace, come away with the impression that the nerve center of the world’s mightiest nation is an oddly ramshackle, disorganized project with respect to architecture and interior decoration, and an unaccountably humble interpretation of national glory and grandeur. They are right.

Many of the rooms have been used for a variety of purposes over the years. Presidents and first ladies have embarked upon renovations, additions and makeovers.

The Vermeil Room, to take one of many examples, was once a billiard room.

Teddy Roosevelt demolished the conservatories in 1902 and commissioned a thorough renovation of the White House, to drag the place out of the Victorian age and dismantle the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, whom Chester A. Arthur had hired for an 1882 renovation.

T.R. also added a few personal touches. He hung a dozen hunting trophies, acquired on big-game safaris, in the State Dining Room, all of which were removed instantly by Ellen Wilson when her husband took up residence.

Photo

A Bo sighting.Credit
Susan Walsh/Associated Press

A NYONE interested in the meandering course of redecoration and renovation should stop at the White House Visitor Center, across from the southeast gate, at the north end of the Commerce Building. A documentary that runs continuously in one corner of the center’s spacious colonnaded hall traces the visual history of the White House, including the ritual dismantling of the Roosevelt antlers.

Several standing exhibitions shed light on topics like, say, “First Families in the White House.” In the Kids’ Corner, young visitors are invited to study a poster showing all the presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama, and then, looking into a mirror, to ask themselves: “Can you see yourself as president?”

The right answer is “Sure, why not?” This is the egalitarian dream that helps explain the architectural style of the White House, lofty classicism translated into democratic plain speech.

The full effect sinks in as the tour ascends to the State Floor, one level above the ground floor. Even the grander rooms open to the public, notably the East Room, the site of large receptions, and the State Dining Room, where the presidential china gets a workout, show restraint and modesty. The smaller reception rooms, redecorated by Jacqueline Kennedy in the early 1960s and known by their color schemes as the Blue Room, the Red Room and the Green Room, give off a whiff of grandma’s parlor.

The gawking possibilities improve markedly here. The rooms are more accessible, although velvet ropes keep visitors away from the furniture and the glassware. Perhaps memories still linger of Andrew Jackson’s post-inaugural reception, when enthusiastic supporters broke several thousand dollars’ worth of china and had to be lured from the premises with bowls of punch strategically placed on the White House lawn.

It is hard to get a good look at the paintings, and there are some good ones. The expected formal portraits, like the painting of Dolley Madison by Gilbert Stuart, share wall space with works by Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Martin Johnson Heade and two somewhat startling modern paintings by John Marin and Jacob Lawrence, both added to the Green Room by Laura Bush.

Opera glasses might be the solution. The canvas I thought was a still life with giant oyster turned out to be a portrait by John Singer Sargent of a society belle in repose, wearing a hat wrapped in mosquito netting.

On the plus side, there’s nothing to stop visitors from turning their backs on the Duncan Phyfe furniture and looking out the windows for some once-in-a-lifetime distance views. From the ovoid Blue Room, to take the choicest example, the eye makes a seductive journey across rolling lawns and a jetting fountain to the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. It’s a vision of peace and serenity in stark contrast to the grubby realities of political life, which is more than half the point of the White House as a national symbol.

Now, about those Secret Service officers. They are good. In fact, they put on a performance that could go a long way toward polishing the agency’s somewhat tarnished image.

To deal with the public, officers get an information packet and two weeks to master it, which they do. Particularly impressive was Officer Hagerman in the State Dining Room.

He told one inquiring visitor, without hesitation, that the large mirror on one wall, its silvering eroded in spots, came from England in the 1790s. When another visitor asked about a mysterious inscription on the mantel, he lunged like a power hitter at a hanging curve ball.

“Would you like me to tell you about it and recite it for you?” he asked a cluster of the curious. The vote was bipartisan and unanimous: yea.

After explaining that the prayer had been composed by John Adams and inscribed on the mantel by Teddy Roosevelt in 1902, Officer Hagerman took a deep thespian breath and orated: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” Reflective silence ensued.

The tour, which takes about a half-hour, disgorges visitors through the entrance and cross halls at the front of the White House. Once you leave, you cannot return. Most visitors take advantage of the moment to snap pictures, and on this occasion they got a surprise. No, not the president or the first lady. Let’s be realistic. However, the first dog, Bo, made an unexpected appearance.

Dozens of visitors, who had been taking momentously historic photos of one another against the backdrop of the White House, wheeled around and swarmed the dog like the Royal rat pack catching sight of Prince Harry. Bo, exquisitely groomed and ready for adulation, accepted tribute in the form of pats on the head. He even posed for a picture or two before returning to the first dog dish, trailing a cloud of stardust behind him.

A free tour. A sunny spring day at the tail end of cherry blossom season. And Bo. God bless America.

Correction: May 17, 2012

An article on May 3 about the White House public tour misidentified which of Woodrow Wilson’s wives removed Theodore Roosevelt’s hunting trophies from the house. She was Ellen Wilson, his first wife — not Edith Wilson, whom he married after Ellen’s death.

A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2012, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: A House Tour: Yes, That House. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe